The Red Barn

Two couples leave a party together in a terrible snow storm; only three people make it back to the house – thus starts The Red Barn, David Hare’s new play based on La Main, by Georges Simenon (he of Maigret fame).

Donald and Ingrid Dodd (Mark Strong and Hope Davis), along with Ray and Mona Sanders (Nigel Whitmey and Elizabeth Debicki) leave a party at one of the Dodds’ neighbours, due to the bad weather moving in.  This is Connecticut in winter, and bad weather means blinding snow, driving winds and days of power cuts.  But their car runs off the road and they are left to walk the final mile back to the Dodds’ house.  When only Donald, Ingrid and Mona make it, Donald is dispatched back out into the storm to find Ray,  his childhood friend.  Two hours later, he comes back, alone.  As the next hours and days unfold so much is left unsaid – much of this play exists in the silences and negative spaces – that when the answers are finally revealed they are shocking for all that they are mundane.

The play is dark and intense, and much of this is down to Mark Strong’s excellent performance as the middle-aged Donald, shaken out of his middle-class complacency by his own actions, and by the worlds opened up to him by the actions of others.  Hope Davis is also outstanding as pillar-of the community Ingrid, the upper class scion who manages to make other feels uncomfortable purely by holding herself to such high standards that she intimidates the mere mortals around her.  Davis’s performance is a masterclass of restraint, bringing to life a woman whose influence and power come from all the things she doesn’t say.

Jealousy is a driving force behind much of the action in the play.  Some of that’s about class, some about money, and quite a bit about sex.  Dysfunctional relationships and unmet expectations abound, with devastating, albeit slow-burn, consequences.

The staging and set design (Bunny Christie, Paule Constable, Tom Gibbons and Tim Reid) are excellent (not unusual for a National Theatre production).    The conceit of using black screens/curtains to create a shifting viewing aperture during some scenes – to emphasise movement, or stillness, or claustrophobia, or revelation – works well, and is combined with some astonishingly fast set changes.

I had no idea what to expect going into this play, but I’m very glad we took the opportunity to see it.

The Libertine

Finding ourselves in London for a weekend, and at something of a loose end on the Saturday, I fell back on a tried and tested diversion – seeking cheap theatre tickets.  I struck gold, with half-price tickets stalls seats (one row behind the top price section) for a matinee of Stephen Jeffreys’ The Libertine.  This run, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, stars Dominic Cooper in the eponymous role originally played by John Malkovich, and later portrayed by Johnny Depp in the film.

John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, writer, poet, alcoholic, atheist, libertine, was a sometime favourite of Charles II, recently restored to the crown in part due to the first Earl of Rochester’s efforts. Wilmot is a man of contradictions, both revelling in every possible freedom the post-Puritan era affords, whilst seemingly disgusted by himself and the society that enables him.  He treats his wife with casual cruelty when they are together but writes her letters full of love and longing when they’re apart.  He seeks out adoration and attention but despises those who gives it to him.

The play takes place during Rochester’s spectacular final bout of self-destruction and creativity.  He’s in London, writing and drinking and whoring as usual, despite the fact that on this occasion his wife is with him in London rather than being left behind at their country estate.  “He lives differently in the city” his wife observes, sadly.

He meets Elizabeth Barry (Ophelia Lovibond doing well with somewhat overwrought and repetitive material) in her early days on the London stage.  She’s an actress of rare talent – or at least she would be, if the audience weren’t demanding a stylised recitation of each role, rather than any kind of naturalistic performance.  Rochester is intrigued, and offers to coach Barry; she is resistant at first to what she perceives as his attempt to control her.  Eventually their tempestuous relationship results in her becoming one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation – and in an illegitimate daughter.

He and his acquaintances are involved in a drunken brawl; one of their number is killed as the rest take to their heels, and Rochester is branded a coward.  The London crowd will accept – even celebrate – his licentiousness, his gambling, his filthy poems, his blasphemy and his anti-monarchist leanings, but they will not accept the perception of cowardice.

He is commissioned by the King to write a play, a glorious epic to celebrate the restoration of the monarchy.  What he writes in honour of his King is, basically, pornography.  A song performed with great joy and gusto by the ladies of the cast in honour of “the dildo” is the least of it; his masterpiece is to climax, so to speak, with an orgy scene, to be performed “in the flesh”.

The King has had enough, and finally banishes Rochester from court for good.  Broken, shamed and mortality ill, Rochester returns to his estate, where in the course of what a modern alcoholic might refer to as “hitting rock bottom”, he finally undergoes a religious epiphany.

The production has received mixed reviews.  Some feel it lacks lightness, that’s it’s played too straight, too dark.  And there are reports of some people walking out.  To be fair, it is played straight – in an early monologue to the audience, Rochester announces, “You will not like me,” and he means it.  He isn’t, in anything other than superficial ways, likeable.  By the end of the play he’s shown himself to be selfish and cruel, unable and most probably unwilling to prevent his overwhelming self-loathing from damaging (in some cases destroying) those around him.  And Cooper isn’t playing for laughs; in his monologues to the audiences there’s no sly wink and nod, no charming Lothario.

I’m more surprised by people walking out – was it too wordy for them perhaps, or too lewd?  Well, yes it’s wordy – the play is written in the style of a Restoration comedy, with big speeches, and deliberate phrasing, but it’s easier than Shakespeare.  And too lewd?  Well, yes, maybe more knob jokes even than Shakespeare (see previous mention of The Dildo song), but there’s no nudity, and such sex as there is takes place mostly under cover of voluminous skirts and darkness.  Plenty of fucks and cunts, but if bad language offends you, why are you watching a play called The Libertine in the first place?

Overall, we very much enjoyed it.  It’s smutty and funny – very funny – for a play that’s not played for laughs.  It’s dark and tragic and full of unlikable people being awful to each other, but there’s humanity and vigour and a desperate lust for life, however squalid it may be.

The Lost Child Of Lychford by Paul Cornell

A stressed Church of England vicar is preparing for her first Christmas in her rural Cotswold parish, Lychford.  Between well-meaning parishioners sympathising that she has to work “more than one day a week” in the festive season, a determinedly awkward couple insisting on a bizarrely complicated Christmas Eve wedding, and that bloody Greg Lake song everywhere, Lizzie’s just about reached breaking point.  And then she sees a ghost.

Seeing a ghost is not necessarily the strangest thing that Lizzie has encountered in her time in the Cotswold village; The Lost Child of Lychford is Paul Cornell’s follow-up to The Witches Of Lychford, a supernatural love-letter to his adopted Cotswold village home of Fairford, and that involved magic, fairies and evil embodied in the form of a national supermarket chain.  So the fact of the ghost is not necessarily what bothers Lizzie most, it’s the fact that it’s the ghost of a small child, simultaneously terrifying and disturbing and vulnerable.

Lizzie consults her fellow “witches” Autumn and Judith – the two women who came together with Lizzie to save the village (and themselves) in the previous novella – but mostly just wants to focus on getting through to the other side of Christmas unscathed.  Her chances of that start taking a turn for the worse when she recognises the child – the real, flesh and blood, definitely alive, child – with his Mum as an older sibling is dropped off at school.  After that, things start getting really weird.

In common with the previous book, this is not a cosy “things going bump in the night” ghost story.  I think, in part, that’s because (again, as with the previous book) there’s a lot of subtext here about faith – not just religious faith, but the kind of fundamental belief in self that is critical to surviving a concerted, targeted, mindfuck.  Each of the three women are challenged by events to find or lose themselves, and the fate of the village (and the fate of so much more) rest on their own ability to find and hold to the core of themselves.  Events take a decidedly dark, unsettling turn, and the insidious undermining of the mental stability of each of the women is painful to read, but their individual resourcefulness and refusal to let each other be lost is as key to the story as the attempts to break them.

Despite “only” being a novella, there’s an awful lot here to enjoy – a great modern take on the traditional Christmas Eve ghost story.

Then She Was Gone by Luca Veste

A man is mugged whilst walking his infant daughter; as he slips into unconsciousness, he realises his daughter’s been taken.  But as the police try to investigate the apparent kidnap, it becomes clear that there’s no sign he ever had a daughter, no evidence to support his story about his recently-ended relationship, and no sign of the woman he claimed to have been living with – but enough blood in the house he used to live in to suggest an adult was killed there…

Then She Was Gone is Luca Veste’s fifth Murphy and Rossi novel.  Like its predecessors, it’s a police procedural dealing with multiple killings in Liverpool and the surrounding area.  And like its predecessors, there’s a strong psychological component.

A few years after the prologue, a rising political star has gone missing, and DI Murphy is annoyed to find himself tasked with finding the man – who also seems to have been disconcertingly absent from his publicly acknowledged life.  He grumbles to DS Rossi, whilst simultaneously trying to curb her natural antagonism towards the Tory candidate.  As they dig into the hidden elements of missing man’s life, they discover he set up and led a wannabe alpha male club at university – imagine a Bullingdon Club-GamerGate mash-up, with a bit less charm.

As the investigation progresses, the club seems to be of increasing importance, but while people are happy to talk about the dress code (smart suits at all times), the exclusivity, the money, the parties, no-one wants to talk about the misogyny, the sexually predatory behaviour, the roofies, the victim blaming and shaming.

As the investigation becomes more complex, Rossi faces a significant ethical/moral dilemma, and it becomes clear that several of the protagonists are playing a very long game indeed.  Luca pulls together the various strands into an explosive, surprising denouement.

One theme that I particularly like in this series is the personal agency given to characters who might otherwise be “just” victims.  In the Murphy/Rossi series the victims often fight back – either physically, mentally or just by their refusal to be destroyed by their experiences.  Here, there’s an added twist of overt misogyny for the victims to contend with, as Luca effectively calls out the “I’ve got a daughter” type of moral equivocation that many sexists and misogynists use as their only reason to treat a small subset of women as something other than prey or reward.

As ever with Luca’s books, I find the psychological complexities compelling.  There’s clear themes here about vengeance and moving on, about the nuances of what’s right, what’s ethical, what’s moral, what within the rules, what’s within the law – and how those all interact and/or conflict at times.  Murphy’s reaction to Rossi’s personal dilemma is coloured by his own previous failure to disclose a potential conflict of interest; both police officers find it difficult to condemn a very personal form of revenge carried out by one of the characters.

This book lives in the space between obvious black or white choices, and is richer and more powerful for it.  Highly recommended.

The Wire In The Blood, and The Retribution by Val McDermid

The Wire In The Blood is Val McDermid’s second novel featuring clinical psychologist Tony Hill and DI Carol Jordan.  The first book in the series, The Mermaids Singing, marked something of a change for McDermid; already the author of several popular series of crime novels, she took things in a much darker direction with Mermaids.  The Hill/Jordan books focus on dangerous and sadistic serial killers, with Jordan, Hill and their colleagues often in grave danger.  There’s more emphasis on both the police procedure and the psychological profile of the perpetrators.

The Wire In The Blood features Jacko Vance, a very well-known, very well-liked TV personality who is as famous for his charity work as he is for his TV work.  Beyond his public fundraising work, he also gets involved behind the scenes – he does portering and the like in hospitals, and he spends private time with the sick and the dying.  If that sounds unsettlingly familiar, it should – McDermid has acknowledged that Vance was inspired, at least in part, by the rumours in the journalism world about Jimmy Saville, years before his death and public disgrace.

Vance is a British hero, an ex-Olympic athlete who lost an arm saving a man following a car crash.  He’s driven, motivated – and a psychopath.  This isn’t a spoiler, because The Wire In The Blood isn’t a whodunnit.  It is, in parts, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, and even a did-anyone-do-it, but mostly is an intricate cat and mouse game between Vance and Hill, Jordan and their team.

Tony Hill is setting up a new national profiling team of young and keen police officers, despite some very clear reservations from more senior officers.  He sets his team a paper exercise – to look at a large selection of missing persons cases and see if they can find anything using their new knowledge and skills.  One does – fiercely competitive Shaz Bowman connects a series of missing teenagers with local publicity appearances by Vance.  When the idea isn’t taken as seriously as she would wish, Bowman continues her investigation outside of official channels, with devastating consequences.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, Jordan’s applying some profiling techniques of her own in her new job, and causes some ruffled feathers when she spots a pattern of arson that her team have missed.  Given the book was written in 1997, it’s hardly a surprise that Jordan’s also facing quite explicit, as well as much less overt, sexism from many of her colleagues and seniors.

The relationship between Jordan and Hill is a thing of fragile, painful beauty.  There’s clearly something there, but it seems to be neither properly romantic, nor sexual, in nature.  “Longing” is perhaps the word that springs to mind.  Their relationship seems to be drawing them together at the same time as it keeps them well apart.  There’s so much unspoken here between them.

The Wire In The Blood is violent, and unflinching, and at times painful to read; it’s also gripping and densely-layered and a bloody good read.

 

The Retribution is the seventh book in the series (and McDermid’s 25th novel), and is in many ways a direct sequel to The Wire In The Blood – although many years and four books worth of events sit between them.  I’ve read most, but not all, of the other books in the series, but none of them recently, so I was glad that I’d re-read The Wire In The Blood a few days before starting The Retribution – but McDermid’s mastered the difficult art of giving enough backstory that it’s not strictly necessary to have read the previous books, without weighing down the book with excessive exposition.

16 years after The Wire In The Blood, and Jacko Vance is in prison.  He killed – tortured, raped and murdered – several teenage girls, and he tortured then murdered a police officer.  He was not convicted of all offences, in part because he persuaded a long-term acquaintance – perhaps better described as an unquestioning fanboy – to perjure himself at the trial.  Appeals, human rights cases and a charmed psychologist have left Vance is a relatively good position.  He’s in general population, he’s got the best prosthetic arm money can buy (which means it’s disconcertingly lifelike), and he’s got prisoners who will do his bidding.  Most importantly, he’s about to be given day release for work experience…

Thus begins an even more brutal, vicious and bloody cat-and-mouse game between Vance and Jordan/Hill.

Hill and Jordan are working separately, both facing challenges as usual, but their relationship (such as it is) seems to be on an even keel.  It’s still ambiguous – more than platonic, less than romantic, definitely not sexual.  As an aside, Hill’s impotence is noted as having been an issue for the two of them in the past, and it’s a long-running thread in the series; a motif for Hill’s psychological state and reaction to both his formative years and his chosen profession.

As Vance starts enacting his long-planned, brutal revenge, Hill and Jordan – and the people around them – are facing problems that seem very familiar: senior officers who either don’t support them or act against them, colleagues who doubt their effectiveness in the face of overwhelming evidence, explicit bigotry… it’s notable reading the two books back-to-back how little seems to have changed in the culture of their working environment.

The one element of the book I found puzzling was the B story, involving a series of murders that Jordan’s team investigate.  It felt like a storyline that could have been expanded into the main story of a novel, but here is treated as something of a filler, it’s primary narrative purpose apparently to create a tension between competing demands on the time and attention of Jordan and her team.  But as such, it conversely feels a bit overdone – presumably most Major Investigation Teams handle more than one case at a time as a matter of course?  So it feels like it falls between two stools; not quite done full justice as a storyline in itself, but also something rather more than it needs to be to fulfil it’s purpose.

This book is as least bloody an unflinching as it’s predecessor but the ending is curiously low-key.  After escalating rage and violence, the end comes with little fanfare and something close to banality.  Most challenging to the reader – expectations set by the conventions of the genre – is that the climax of the action takes place “off page”.  The reader and the protagonists find out what’s happened in the same way – someone tells them.  It’s a brave choice, compounded by the emotional climax of the book being equally low key; the fireworks have come before, the end, as with so much between Jordan and Hill, is in the negative space and all that’s left unspoken.

At the time of reading, I felt quite unsatisfied by this state of affairs.  But some time to reflect, and I’m left pondering whether my instinctive reaction was fair.  As with Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Last Rituals, perhaps my reaction is too conditioned by a lifetime’s exposure to the common tropes and conventions of the genre; perhaps it’s not necessary for a whodunnit to be a race against time before the murderer kills again, perhaps a crime thriller doesn’t have to finish with blood and fireworks, but can – like so much of life – happen while we’re looking the other way, and leave us feeling traumatised and bereft rather than happy and fulfilled.

 

There’s two more Hill/Jordan novels waiting to be read, and both are on my TBR pile; I’m looking forward to seeing how McDermid brings her protagonists back from the cliffedge she just apparently shoved them over.

Last Rituals, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

A wealthy German history student living in Iceland is found dead, strangled, eyes gouged out and a strange symbol carved into his flesh.  The student, heavily into witchcraft, body modification, erotic auto-asphyxiation, has been wedged into cupboard at his university, and is found when his body lands (messily) on top of a rather arrogant academic.

Thus starts Last Rituals, the first of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s 6-book-and-counting Thora Gudmundsdottir series.  Thora is a lawyer – not specialising in criminal law – and by a somewhat circuitous route ends up being offered a generous contract by the student’s family to investigate the death.  They are convinced that the man in police custody isn’t the killer.  They decline to disclose why they’re so sure, but offer more money that Thora can rationalise turning down.  She’s a single mum to two children (a monosyllabic teen and an exceptionally tidy six-year-old), her car’s broken down, and she’s struggling to make ends meet.  So she accepts the deal, despite her misgivings, and despite her instant dislike of the family’s interlocutor, Matthew.

Some of what follows is cliché: students drink, smoke dope and and are utterly bored by the petty concerns of adults; teenagers get up to what teenagers get up to when they think their parents won’t notice; academics play office politic; and two intelligent, good looking people who start off disliking each other overcome their cultural differences and, um, warm to each other.

But there’s a lot here that’s new (or at least new to me) – plenty of Icelandic and medieval history, plenty of discussion of witchcraft and torture, plenty of clash between German and Icelandic cultures.  Along the way there’s missing ancient texts, tongue splitting, jealousy, casual sex, enough smoking to make you start coughing reflexively, and the least convincing receptionist since Tattoo Fixers.

The story twists and turns, without perhaps ever reaching the heights it could, but there’s no doubt that this is a skillful storyteller at work.  Perhaps a touch of what might uncharitably be described as flatness comes from reading it in translation (although maybe I’m doing Bernard Scudder, the translator, a disservice there, given that understatement is key to the current fascination with Scandi Noir).  Perhaps it’s the knowledge that Yrsa is currently regarded exceptionally highly in crime writing circles, so there’s a feeling of “nearly, but not quite” when reading this early work.  Perhaps it’s just a change from the multi-corpsed, high-stakes-thriller nature of much modern crime writing, and it’s better to appreciate the change of pace rather than complain churlishly that the book isn’t what it’s not trying to be.
Overall I liked this book much more than this all wibbling might suggest; I’m certainly planning on reading a lot more of Yrsa’s work.

Escaped Alone

I’m walking down the street and there’s a door in the fence open and inside there are three women I’ve seen before.

Escaped Alone is a (very) short play by Caryl Churchill, featuring four older women spending an afternoon sitting in a back garden, soaking up the sun, and talking.  There’s a subtext about the extent we’re all to blame for our own misfortunes, but mostly, it seems to me, it’s about life and love and loss, about action and reaction, about possibilities and phobias and terrible rage.

The play is narrated, after a fashion, by Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett), whose lines open (see above) and close the play.  She also punctuates the ongoing conversations by delivering occasional Cassandra-like descriptions of surreal apocalyptic events.  These events are described in deadpan style, at once funny and troubling.  The laughter that tends to accompany the start (“the hunger began when the food was diverted to television”) peters out with descriptions of desperation and death.

There are some fabulous lines.  “I always wanted to go to Japan”, say depressed and agoraphobic Lena; “Get to Tesco first” replies retired doctor Sally (revealed during a ‘cut-away’ to be intensely, debilitatingly, cat-phobic).  Lena ponders during another revelatory moment that it’s better to be in a empty room, because there’s “fewer things to mean nothing at all”.

It’s notable that although some of the discussion – perhaps most of it – revolves around the domestic, there’s no mention of the menopause; children and grandchildren are mentioned in passing rather than being the focus of discussion.  These women are people first and foremost, not conforming to some tired stereotype of what middle-aged or elderly women should be or should care about.

My theatre companion was unimpressed: he found it clunky and stilted.  I suspect this is a result of the direction – the dialogue doesn’t flow naturally, the women rarely interrupt each other, instead each halts or pauses before the next one speaks.  In some cases, this ought to be a tailing off as the speaker fails to complete a sentence or thought, but somehow it doesn’t quite sound that way.  For me, it worked – more or less – as a stylistic choice, but I can understand why it absolutely wouldn’t work for some people.  To be honest, I’m surprised this hasn’t cropped up in any of the reviews I’ve read, because it really is very noticeable.

As an aside (and obviously in no way specifically aimed at the woman five seats down the row from me) – if you’re going to turn up to a performance barely a minute before curtain up, and then laugh hysterically and loudly during the mildly funny and the overtly serious bits, then you shouldn’t be in a theatre at all; but if you really really must, it helps if you don’t tweet about being drunk twenty minutes before you arrive.

Flash Fiction

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

The most famous short story in the world, usually attributed to Ernest Hemingway.  It’s a perfect example of flash fiction, the ultra-short fiction that’s popular in both original and fan fiction.

I quite like dabbling in flash fiction.  It’s a good discipline, trying to convey a story’s worth of meaning in just a few words.  Writers are often told to “show, don’t tell”, or “lose the adjectives”, but this is another order of paring down to just the essentials.  This is about considering every single word – even the “and”s, the “or”s, the “the”s.  It’s often easier to write in the first person, not least because you can drop pronouns left, right and centre without necessarily losing meaning.

It’s easy to get wrong, though, as my overstuffed drafts folder will attest.  The key, I think, is in judging just how much of the heavy lifting the reader is prepare to do, and how much help the writer has to give them. As an aside, it think this is why flash fiction is popular in fan fiction circles; the characters are a given, the setting is (usually) a given, and possibly the common tropes or fanon (the commonly accepted fandom tropes/conventions) are a given.  Under those circumstances, almost all the work has been done, the writer just needs to provide a story.  No wonder fandoms love flash fiction.  Drabbles are a very common form – stories of exactly 100 words.  Some fandoms get creative; the Sherlock fandom created the 221B in honour of their protagonist’s address – a story of exactly 211 words, the final word beginning with B.

Without the framing of an existing canon to rely on, writers of original flash fiction have to use all the tools at their disposal to put the reader in the right mindset to fill in all the unwritten words.  Consider the baby shoes example.  It’s a story of loss.  It’s grief, it’s love, it’s broken promises and unnatural endings.  It’s burying your child.  It’s anger, it’s pain, it’s heartbreak.  It’s awful practicality – or perhaps grinding poverty.  It might even be murder.  But let’s face it, “giant baby”, or “wrong colour shoes”, or even “shoes on a baby?  Who does that?” are all equally valid interpretations; I doubt they’re common ones though.  Something about the brevity encourages us to seek out a deeper meaning.  The story’s only six words long, it must mean something, right?
For those interested in such things, CrimeFest’s FlashBang competition, for original crime stories of 150 words or less is open for another couple of days.

Bloodstream by Luca Veste

Bloodstream, Luca Veste’s third novel, takes place two years after the events of The Dying Place.  While Murphy and Rossi try to keep together a team in the wake of a major re-organisation that somehow leaves them overstaffed and short-handed, a serial killer strikes.  Not just any serial killer – this one kills couples, starting with a pair of cut-price reality TV “stars” popularly known as ChloJoe, kicking off an all-too familiar media circus.

Of course, this being a Luca Veste novel, there’s a lot more going on than just a damaged, psychotic serial killer on the loose, and the cops trying to stop him.  The after effects of the climactic finale of the previous book are still being felt – by Murphy, his family, and his team.  Murphy finally seems to be getting his marriage back on an even keel, but that one night of extreme violence has changed, and in some cases destroyed, the lives of those around him.  Rossi, seemingly less directly affected, is finally pondering the wisdom of a relationship – but her man of choice seems just a bit too good to be true.  

On top of this, a missing teenager may – or may not – be more closely linked to Murphy than he really wants to admit.

Through all the layers, this is a book about relationships, about secrets and lies, and about trust and forgiveness.  Everyone has secrets, right?  Except the killer thinks that secrets kill a relationship, and he forces his victims to confront hard truths, under the worst possible conditions.  And as the serial killer unflinchingly pursues his own vision of a perfect relationship, Murphy, Rossi et al are dealing with the flawed reality – whether platonic or romantic –  and face rather more complex choices.

This is another strong outing from Veste – and I’m very much looking forward to the next one.

Harm, by Hugh Fraser

Harm is a solid and interesting debut from novel from Hugh Fraser (yes, that Hugh Fraser), that manages the rather smart trick of being two different genres at the same time.  It’s not particularly unusual in that: Paul Cornell, Mike Carey, Richard Morgan, and Ben Aaronovitch, for example, all write or have written the sort of urban fantasy that’s both crime fictions and SFF; Tami Hoag and J D Robb are just two names that spring to mind in the well-populated romantic suspense field.  But Fraser goes for a blend of action-fuelled crime thriller, and a form of the rags-to-riches saga that typically start with the sexual abuse of a child and end up with her running a large (and possibly criminal) business empire.  

The difference here is that this isn’t misery fic; the flashbacks give us a who and a why, and there’s a story there in it’s own right, but the actions starts in the “now” – 1974 – with the flashbacks covering a few months in 1956.  There’s no long saga here, moving us from one to the other; there’s now, and there’s the life-changing events than.

It’s Mexico, it’s 1974, and a drugs deal going very, very wrong.  Rina, our protagonist, is an assassin caught up on the action who ends up running for her life.  She almost makes it, but is caught and kidnapped and ends up in a series of increasingly dangerous situations as various drug dealers, gangsters, and random others seek to make use of her “special” skills to take advantage of the fallout of the drugs deal.

It’s Ladbroke Grove, it’s 1956, and Rina, her younger siblings and her alcoholic mother are living in poverty and squalor in a London that’s half teddy boys and half post-war damage (of every sort).  Inevitably a family like that, with no money save what the absent father allegedly left behind following a robbery, falls prey to a variety of exploiters, through a series of escalating encounters that start in tragedy and end in freedom (of sorts) with a heck of a lot of violence along the way.

The devil’s in the detail, and sometime’s Rina’s exploits in Mexico seem just tad far-fetched – her athleticism is almost superhuman and her gaydar seems to not only be functioning perfectly, it has an almost implausible number of hits.  But the thriller element of the story barrels along at pace with RIna thinking and fighting and finagling her way in and out of trouble at every turn, being casually awesome in a way that would be considered unremarkable were this a story about a man.  So kudos to Fraser for never flinching from having a female protagonist who’s every bit as fucked up and formidable as her male colleagues in the genre.

It’s in London, though, that reality hits.  RIna’s family lives in a “flat” – two squalid, rodent-infested rooms in a house three-storey house.  The cold tap in the kitchen (that doubles as her mother’s bedroom) is the only indoor plumbing.  Domestic violence in endemic, economic and sexual exploitation rife.  The kids are sent to school unwashed and underfed.  This isn’t fiction, this is reportage.  In the early post-war years, my Mum (the eldest child at ten years old) lived with her extended family – two sisters and their six kids – in one room in a standard semi-detached house, again, with no indoor plumbing save a cold tap in the kitchen.  When you listen to women of that generation talk, there’s a terrible sense of the ever-present threat of sexual abuse, usually (luckily) avoided by keeping out of reach of certain uncles and family friends, and never, ever, allowing oneself to be alone with those men.  Maybe the worst thing is the lack of outrage, the apparent attitude of “that’s just how some men are, what do you expect?”.  It’s not that they think it was acceptable, it’s just that it was the background noise to their childhoods.  Not tolerated, unavoidable, like poverty and a the privy in the back garden.

In the London sequences, it’s this, the ubiquity of the threat of violence and exploitation, the constant need to be aware, to take precautions, to know when to fight and when to hide, that gets under the skin and haunts the latter-day scenes.  We don’t just see why Rina became the woman she did; we viscerally understand why.

For me, it’s the blending of the two stories, told in parallel, unflinching but not voyeuristic, that lifts this book above the crowd.  At the time of writing this post, it’s got a 4.9/5 rating on Amazon, and I’m not a bit surprised.